


Cupola

by 35grams (caxxe)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angels, Assassins & Hitmen, Churches & Cathedrals, Crime Families, Demons, M/M, Redemption
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2018-08-10 11:16:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7842808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caxxe/pseuds/35grams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There's a priest inside who's a dear friend of the man you plan to kill. He offers men like you sanctuary."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chase

Wrong alley.

The assassin surges forward anyway. His lungs burn. He resists the urge to look behind him.

His palms tear as he scales the loose-bricked dead end wall. A fire escape waits for him on the other side. Shots hiss by his ear. They dent the gnarled metal. Maybe it was already dented. Doesn't matter. It's cover. There's no cover on the roof. He shouldn't have gone to the roof. He doesn't know this city. He doesn't know its roofs, doesn't know its streets. He shouldn't have taken the job. He clambers onto the roof. He looks behind him. He shouldn't have looked behind him. Two cars become six. One chopper becomes three.

Terminate target. Avoid cathedral.

Every last corner of the city was bugged. Every passerby knows what he's done. There was no other reason he couldn't once slip away for longer than a moment before someone points, before someone shouts, before someone aims. 

He's good at what he does. Good doesn't get shot. Good doesn't get caught.

Terminate target. Avoid cathedral.

Hopping from one rooftop to another does him no favors. They're turning on searchlights. All the city's eyes are on him. Every flash of light burns him. He shouldn't have taken the job. But he's good at what he does.

He lands hard on his feet with the next jump. Buildings grow farther apart. Choppers near firing range. Fury sloshes in the streets.

When he looks up, he's nearly blinded by it. Three rooftops to his left, a pocket of ocean had risen onto land and assumed the form of bricks and domes. So blue it was even in the midnight void that he would have avoided it simply for the fear that he might just drown in its roiling walls. 

He lands hard again. Calves scream. Thighs whine. Nausea gurgles in his gut. He can't keep doing this. He needs to settle his stomach a moment, fill his lungs a moment, would that he had a moment. 

The air is thick with shots from mourning guns. His good arm weeps.

His informant was shit. He should have seen him for the superstitious opportunist that he was. The assassin races for the glacial blue. He should have bolted for it hours ago.

_Avoid it. You'll wish you were caught and skinned before you c a me anywhere near it. There's a priest inside who-_

His boiling pulse drowns the memory of the man's feeble warnings. The city wouldn't fire on her own church. They wouldn't raze their own soul. He needs only to slip behind a parapet, to hide under a ledge until the waters of the frothing city receded.  

He leaps again. His weeping hands catch a shallow outcrop on one of its outer domes. He pulls himself to its peak before leaping to another. A poppy-head-topped-cupola sits on its highest, widest dome.

He slips. His stomach hurdles into his throat as he falls. His bloody hands slip once, twice. Finally, he catches a ledge, and his heart catches in his throat **.**

He'd planned to park himself on the cupola ledge and squeeze into the shadows cast by its carved, weathered arches, but when he nears it, he barely swallows a hysteric laugh at the sight. One of its panels has no pane. 

No shots pierce the air anymore. No shouts rumble below. Of course they don't. Of course they wouldn't.

With hands trembling with exertion and disbelief, he hoists himself through the open pane and scans the interior. There was no floor to separate the cupola column from the interior swell of its greatest dome, but  - and now it was becoming difficult to suppress the near-hysterical relief that wells in his chest - there is a modest lattice of rafters in the alcove that look more than sturdy enough to carry the weight of two or three of him.

The assassin slides down onto the nearest of them and takes his first unburdened breath since the last crimson lakes drained from the evening sky. He swipes one bloodied palm against his front and brings it to his mouth. He's panting like a dog.

A sea of candles coil and crest in the belly of the cathedral. The flickering waves snare his wandering eyes in their golden drift nets and beckon them to the cathedral's eternal residents. 

He hadn't put it together before, why more onion domes than gothic spires adorned the structure, though he forgives himself for not sparing a thought for cathedral architecture with a bead in his arm and a price on his head. But he knows now. He recognizes it now. Mosaics and paintings and carvings and reliefs of prophets and saints and martyrs adorn every last inch of the innards of the orthodox church. He knows them. They know him.

Their names and their colors and the precise curvature of their domes differ, but all their prophets and saints and martyrs were one. For all he knew, every mosaic in every house of God from here to the ends of the earth was cut from the same glass, bloomed in the same dye, every ounce of pressed and carved and polished gold, bled from the same vein. 

A lifetime ago, he wondered with his last theistic breath whether they'd forgotten him. Maybe he hadn't asked the right question.

His palms wail, torn raw. He needs to clean them, needs to wrap them. Needs to take the bead out of his arm. Doesn't need a reminder of what happens if he doesn't. Doesn't need it ever again. 

He tightens the torn strip of his sleeve he'd used to tie around his arm just above the elbow to stem the flow. He stills. He isn't alone.

Later, he'll forget how he knew. He won't recall if it had been a stray movement or an odd sound, won't remember that as his fevered blood finally receded from the shores of his sweat-filmed skin, the same air he'd stirred from his uninvited entrance had rippled through the cathedral's flesh and bone and woken it from its gentle lull. 

He'll only remember drawing in a great breath with one palm muting his still-panting mouth and the other wrapped around the chipped handle of a blade and peering past the edge of the rafter beneath his ratty-soled shoes and his chest-drawn knees to catch spun gold adorning the head of a robed man standing below him with such precision that the assassin wondered, adrenaline-drunk, whether their hearts were vertically aligned. 

Surely the man below had heard his wild panting, his deafening pulse. He tenses. The whole city must have seen him slip inside. A single man needed only to burst through the cathedral doors and ask this man where he was. And he wouldn't need to lift anything but his eyes. It's over.

_There's a priest inside who-_

But that oil slick fear lasts only until indignation strikes a match. It's past midnight. The priest, from what he can tell from the rafters' considerable height, is not even praying. His lips are unmoving. No one else is here. 

He's here. Motionless, but for the errant breeze that troubles the odd hair on his head. A statue holding the assassin's fate in the cant of its marble eyes. He tightens his grip on the blade. He would, if he had to. He would. The Cloth means nothing to him now, and it should have meant nothing before. A man was a man was a man. 

The grand doors swing open. Boots thunder down the aisles, and for the first time, the robed man moves to look at his visitors. 

The assassin grips the blade. He would. He would. 

The priest approaches and greets them, invites them to share their troubles, and the men tell him what had just become of the most powerful man in the city.

The assassin narrows his eyes. These men aren't the ones who chased him. This was no mob. They wore their wealth in the cut of their suits and their master's house in the gold of the lion's head stitched into each impeccably tailored breast-pocket. This was the inner circle. 

He curls as far into the shadows as his limbs allow. He knows these men. He'd watched them for weeks. He knows their wives' maiden names. He knows the dates and times of their son's recitals and their daughter's graduations, knows who among them can't quite understand the third act of Macbeth and who has a position lined up at the U.N. He knows these men because he's good at what he does. Good listens. Good watches. Good doesn't get caught. 

The rising tide of their voices sweeps into the cupola.

"-can't begin to understand what this means to you, Father-"

"-a great man, a kind man-"

"-told him it would happen without more security. If not tomorrow, then the next day. And today is that day-"

"-are you feeling well, Father?"

And maybe there was something of the divine in the timing of the informant's warning coming back to the assassin in full.

_There's a priest inside who's a dear friend of the man you plan to kill. He-_

But now a different kind of voice breaks through his thoughts, and maybe there is something of the divine in the way the assassin, hidden, alone, aloft, felt the barest touch of what couldn't possibly be someone's breath against the curve of his ear, and maybe there is something of the unnatural in the way several dozen meters separate him from the priest below and yet his voice murmurs as if his lips are not an inch apart from his ear.

"Don't spare a thought for me, Fredrick," the priest says. "You are all welcome to stay-"

"We're here for the rat," another says. "He's here. We know he's here." 

"You know my answer to that," says the priest.

A moment of silence passes between them. A sound drifts up like one of the men had stepped closer. 

"Your own friend-" The same man seethes before something like a scuffle breaks out. The assassin peers out as far as he dares. The man was being held back by two others.

"My grandfather!" he cries, a sound like a stricken animal. "Your uncle!" He jabs at the men at his arms before breaking out of their hold and approaching the priest again.

The priest is as still as he had been before their arrival. "If that man is here," the priest says, again as if his lips hovered just so over the assassin's ear, "the man has a right to sanctuary. Emil. Your grandfather gave his blessing to this tradition himself. He himself once benefited from-"

"And now he's dead."

One of the men moves to stop him, maybe, calm him, embrace him, the assassin would never know, none of them would ever know. Emil shoves him aside and pulls a sidearm out of his jacket.

The assassin's blood hammers in his ears. He nearly drops his blade. He's aiming for the priest. He's not supposed to aim for the priest.

The assassin would have killed him himself. He would. This is something else entirely. If that bullet leaves its chamber, he owes a debt to a dead man. He can't owe a debt to a dead man. He owes enough to the living.

Slowly, the assassin's good arm slips into his jacket and wraps around the handle of his handgun.

But when he moves to pull it out, he can't quite make it budge. It must be stuck in the holster. He tries again. It's still stuck. If he pulls any harder, the leather will groan and give him away. 

The other men had pulled their own sidearms on the youngest of them, on Emil, and attempt to talk him down, but the assassin knows that man and his wife's maiden name and the make of his son’s violin and he knows a man who aims because he doesn't know what else to do. 

There's nothing for it. The assassin has to make noise, has to make sure they see him leave, make sure they see no more use in pestering this priest with his unearned calm and his voice that carries a little too far. 

He shuts his eyes, curls his fist and winds it back before swinging it, hard, against the rafters above his head. 

Shocked sounds below slow his arm. He looks down.

Emil had moved the barrel of his sidearm to his own temple.

"Please," Emil whimpers.

This wasn't right, either. 

The other men lower their guns. They shout and console and beg. None dare approach him. 

The click of the safety echoes off the eyes of glass saints. 

This wasn't right. 

The assassin listened. The assassin watched. He knows this man. He knows Emil to be a believer. Emil prays in this hall. Emil holds his son in his arms here when he tires. Emil helps the older gentlemen up these steps. 

Emil crosses himself before penning every forged signature. Emil tracks his prey but hands subordinates his loaded gun. Emil confesses his every wrong every Sunday with just the right number of tears and the right kind of expression and never quite runs out of things to say.

But Emil believes. This, Emil knows, must know, is murder in the eyes of God. Murder without the chance of repentance. And Emil loves to repent. 

Yet the gun was in his hands, yet no strings that the assassin could see with his own eyes pull him here or there. 

Emil begins to weep. 

The priest steps forward. His doesn't make a sound. Softly, he speaks, yet every saint and every prophet from nave to apse hears him.

"What do you need, my son?"

A tremor seizes the man, rattles him like a toy. "Mm-m-mercy," Emil sputters out. 

The priest steps forward again. He leans down to speak into the man's ear as the barrel remains at his opposite temple, and the assassin knows he shouldn't hear this, knows he shouldn't be able to hear this, but hear it, he does, hears the priest as if it wasn't Emil's ear he speaks into but his own. 

"What will you offer?" the priest asks him, and a shiver coils down the length of his spine.

The assassin watches them. He can't hear his answer. But he can read it on his lips. He can read ' _ _mercy'__  in his swollen, streaming eyes.

The priest brings his hand to the young man's tear-streaked cheek, and the gun clatters to the floor.

Emil makes a wounded noise from the back of his throat. He embraces the priest. He weeps into his shoulder. He sobs into his robes for his father's father. The priest cradles the back of his head.

_There's a priest inside-_

Emil doesn't linger, and neither do the other men. The priest bids them goodbye and shuts the doors.

_Who's a dear friend of the man you plan to kill._

The assassin watches him cross the length of the nave and past the altar without so much as an upward glance, and he wonders despite his rising pulse why he expects the man to know exactly where he is when he's never once addressed him, never once peered up before.

_He offers men like you sanctuary._

The priest leaves through a door behind the altar. The assassin unsheathes his sidearm from its holster. There's no conceivable way it could have gotten stuck before. There was no stray strap, no fraying leather on which to snag. 

_And if you take it,_

There was no way the assassin could know the warmth of his breath against the shell of his ear.

_You'll belong to him._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The cathedral setting won't be just a scenic backdrop, but I'm not deep diving into theology either. I've been thinking about this type of au for a while and what narrative opportunities it opens, but because I have no experience with the roman catholic church aside from what I see in media, anything I could write about it in the way I want to write about it will always feel disingenuous and removed from what could instead be an exploration of lived experience with the orthodox church. All this is to say that this won't be some universal or perfect rendition of the EOC but one as I understand it from my own experience.


	2. Rot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [orthodox choir](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTnxFgmQLKc)

He wraps his arm properly with his collar clenched between his teeth. The bullet will need to come out later. In the mad dash out of the estate, he’d shed nearly all his provisions. No food, no medication. Even this gun had been lifted off a subdued guard. He hadn’t anticipated a chase like that. Crushed glass fills his joints. His legs are warm putty. He needs to stay off his feet.

His things are locked and buried a good two dozen streets away. There was no sense in leading his pursuers straight there, but he wished, now, that he’d taken that chance. Everything he needed to wait out the circling lions for any extended period was tucked into the roots of an unassuming shrub near a statue of some old soldier at the local park. Even if he planned to wait up here in these musty, abandoned scaffolds for extraction, he wouldn’t last two sundowns without, at the very least, a few drops of water. His nose, throat and chest burn with such malice that he nearly forgets his throbbing arm.

A pigeon coos at him from the open panel.

Whether or not he was seen ducking into this exact alcove, they know him to be inside. He can’t even risk a peek out of the open panel lest the movement alerts any one of the hundred eyes on the cathedral’s oceanic walls. This was his last job. He can wait.

No ladder leads up here from below, and he was a light enough sleeper to notice the thunk of one should it come. He was as safe as could be. A pocket of air in ocean depths.

He bunches his jacket under his head and dreams in fits and starts. He sees a nail, he sees an entry wound. He hears the creak of heavy boards, he hears a man’s last breath. He wakes for good when the sky begins to brighten. They’ll know him by now. They’ll know he’s from out of town. They might even know his name is Levi.

The patriarch had heard tales about the prowess of his family’s newest hired gun, had invited him into his office for a drink, maybe a promotion. One of his best men uncorked a bottle that shot glass into his eyes. The others fired guns that shattered in their burning hands. Levi needed fire his own just once. Ten months and three days for a hole between the eyes.

"You occupy my mind, assassin."

Levi sits up. There was no one up here with him. He looks down. No one below. He’s usually better at postponing the less physical consequences of his career until a more opportune time.

All that remains is more cooing. His pigeon acquaintance invited all her friends.

A woman enters through a door behind the altar, and then another. They light candles and replace the old as more stream in, each to a one dressed in all black and wearing beautiful shawls over their hair.

The women arrange themselves in a crescent and begin to vocalize and hum as the sun floods the cupola from the open panel. He'll need to make peace with staying in this ornate cage until sundown. For all he knows, he hasn't yet been spotted here, in his cupola. Already, he thought it his, if only for a little longer.

Attendants and early comers step inside with the heavy toll of the bell, cross themselves, and either mill about or walk unthinkingly to a favored spot, a familiar icon. No pews or seats interrupt the nave but for a number of chairs against the walls for the elderly or infirm. Men in black robes with black sashes of a similarly intricate design as the shawls of the choir women form beside them a crescent of their own and join their voices to theirs. Levi looks for a particular man and is at once relieved and anxious that he isn’t among them.

Worshipers move aside at the entrance as one parting tide. Some bow, others simply lay a hand on their hearts, as the Leonharts slip inside like spilled ink. Lions adorn black breast pockets, black shawls, and black collars. For all their straight backs and proud chests, their cheeks shine and their eyes are blackened, robbed of sleep. The tide closes behind them. Infants gurgle and cry. Hundreds fill the cathedral from one golden, icon-adorned wall to another.

A man Levi takes to be the bishop in his regal, golden robes begins the liturgical service. Byzantine hymns rise in a booming, uninterrupted, heart-rending stream. The waves swell and pool in the echoing cupola.

Weeping fills the cathedral. Crosses are marked across chests, icons kissed. The Leonharts remain as one large, black mass manifesting the very void they carry. Black as hot tar, as an entry wound.

Levi’s chest heaves for the second time. Tears stream silently down his face, one still bloodied with the man being mourned between these walls, tears stolen from his eyes by voices that could wring them from stone.

Levi finally sees him. He is dressed plainly in black with a small, unadorned cross hanging low off his neck. He merely strides here to help an old woman affix her shawl, there to point a boy to the correct page in his hymn book. The priest might have moved like a shadow had Levi not attached to his image profound apprehension just short of horror.

He could not have imagined what he'd seen last night. He would not yet be alive, however much longer he had, if he distrusted his own eyes and ears. He could not attract the attention of this man.

The service ends, though some among the choir remain singing. The bishop announces the date of a proper memorial service once the body is prepared and buried. People mill about. Children mumble hushed questions. When he strains, Levi catches pieces of a conversation between a Leonhart man and the bishop.

"-will find him here-"

"-would you not honor your father’s own wishes-"

"-and you will send your dog away so we can search the-"

The priest from last night approaches them so suddenly that the men startle, that even Levi sees him only a moment before his interruption. He lays an amiable palm on their shoulders and then on his heart as he offers his condolences.

The singing lulls him. Though he slept an hour here and there through the night, he was newly exhausted. He sees a dead man’s eyes in a splash of golden light, in a warped wooden board. Incense burns his eyes, fills his lungs. Even the chirps and coos of his neighbors pull him under. There are shouts of "Where is he?" that he almost doesn’t hear, until he hears nothing at all.

When he wakes again, the cathedral feels empty. The air is still. The sun had set. Only a handful of candles remain lit. He leans out for a better view, wanting to be sure before allowing himself the pleasure of groaning at the pulsing in his legs, at the burn in his chest, and the unabated throbbing in his arm.

When his eyes acclimate to the dark, he finds him. The priest stands below him, right below him. Their hearts could be aligned.

Levi hears his voice as it was before, low and a little mournful, in both the stirring air and within his mind. His hand rises to muffle his breathing as every nerve in him screams that he's right here, again, right here at his ear.

"My name is Erwin," the priest says. "We can shelter you for a time. Maybe even lend an ear."

Levi recoils and doesn’t dare say a word. When he finally looks again, the priest is leaving. He lets him, though his body screams at him to follow. He’s in no state to repeat even half the chase from the night before. His throat grates with each swallow. His stomach growls.

Emil’s cries still echo in his ears. He will not follow that priest.

He looks longingly at the front doors, but knows several dozen eyes must be stationed there. He can’t risk running into the priest through an internal door either. Far be it for him to be superstitious now of all times, but the very air is unnatural around that man.

It’s time. He turns to the open panel and his heart stills. He tells himself it was a trick of the light. An emergency vehicle must have just passed by.

“No,” he breathes in disbelief. Desperately, he stands at last on his groaning legs, grabs a plank of wood with his good arm, and thrust it in front of the opening, in front of the crimson line he couldn’t have seen fluttering through it, through the haze of incense only a moment ago.

The sniper shot nearly blows his arm off. He can’t contain a pained shout as the board shatters and lodges splinters as small as needles, as long as stakes, into his hand. The pigeons scatter. Feathers choke him. He’d been so sure they hadn’t seen him come through here, so sure he could just slip out when he was ready.

An hour or two later, while Levi explores the abandoned equipment in the rafters for something, anything, he could use, a pair of choir girls chatter below, and it’s clear from their muffled speech and the odd crunch that they’re eating something. Levi’s mouth waters. Sweat beads on his skin in the unnaturally hot night. Slowly, he leans over the edge to watch them. They stuff the rest of their sandwiches in their bag and leave it to approach an icon.

Suddenly, one looks at her wrist and grabs the arm of the other before rushing through a side door as if late for something at this hour. It doesn’t matter. The bag remains. Levi’s hands tremble as he rummages wildly for the parts he needs and attaches the cobbled-together pulley to a sturdy beam. With his heart in his throat, he releases the rope and yanks and pulls and nudges until the hook catches on a strap. Tears catch in his lashes as he pulls with a wounded arm and a pierced hand, then again with relief as the bag comes within reaching distance, as he finds the sandwiches – both bitten, so surely untainted should someone even go to such lengths to kill him – and eats with something like rapture.

He shoves a few bills into the bag and lowers it, having to catch his breath a few times and stop whenever the stars in his eyes flash with too much enthusiasm. Finally, it hits the floor where he’d found it. He barely reels the hook back up before his arm refuses to cooperate entirely. It hurts. It hurts so much.

It’s hot. The bullet wound throbs more insistently than ever. It’s too hot. With mounting, understanding horror, he unwraps it. It’s black. It oozes. He laughs.

So this was his choice. A quick bullet or a slow rot. This was supposed to be his last job. This will have been his last job.

“A few other would-be-asassins sought refuge here before you.”

The priest is back. Levi hears his calm words in his ear, hears his measured steps toward him. He can’t even muster the effort to quiet his labored breathing, nor the will. Ten months and four days ago, he was prepared to die. How cruel, he thought, to glimpse a life he wasn’t meant to have.

“It was wrong of me to approach you as I approached them,” the priest says. “I should’ve known you were different. You’re the only one who succeeded.”

“Go away,” Levi whispers.

“You’re dying.”

“What’s it to you?”

“I can’t let you do that.”

Levi shuts his eyes and wishes the devil would shut his ears.

“I need you, assassin.”

Levi laughs until the movement jostles his stinging arm. That was one way to get his attention. “I’m flattered, priest. But I’m retired.”

“I’ll pay handsomely.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Your freedom.”

“Yeah?” Levi whispers. He appreciates whatever acoustic miracle allows his voice to carry without needing to raise it. “Then what do you want?”

“The same.”

Levi frowns. “Freedom. From what?”

“From the man you killed last night.”

His informant’s words return to him. One of them is lying. He laughs again, or thinks he does. He doesn’t really care. “You want me to kill him again?”

“You pretend not to understand. Does he not trap you here, too, from beyond his grave?”

Levi turns on his side and peers down. The man had wheeled a large, full laundry cart right beneath him.

“We can still save you,” the priest says. “Whether or not you accept. Please, fall.”

He wants to fall. His arms want, and his legs and his chest and every other inch of him want. But even as sweat rolls down his temples, as ghosts flutter in and out of his dimming eyes in between white flashes of pain, he knows he won’t. He won’t be indebted ever again.

“Make me,” he says insolently. “Like you made Emil.”

Levi couldn’t make out his face from this height, but his hesitation is satisfying enough.

“You must,” the priest says.

“No.”

Levi hears his steps. He leans over to watch as the priest walks away, but instead of leaving outright, he places his hands on the ornate altar-top with uncharacteristic exhaustion.

“Then do me a favor. Try not to dirty the walls up there with your rotting arm.”

His face glows with fury. He’ll do just that. This priest interrupts his last moments and then ridicules him for not buying his half-assed lies. He doesn’t even care to wonder how he knows the state of his arm. He’ll smear every saint and martyr and nail and splinter. Levi drags himself to the nearest wall and thrusts his bloodied arm against a painting.

A current shoots through him for what couldn’t have been more than a second and yet the most excruciating he’s ever known. A flood of light fills his eyes before they dim, before he loses all feeling in his limbs and crumples to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” Levi hears in the fading dark. “You can't go yet.”


End file.
